Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore

This “perceptive and elegant biography” of modernist poet Marianne Moore “captures well the strange and entrancing drama” of her life (The Wall Street Journal).

Winner of the Plutarch Award for the Best Biography of 2013

In the popular imagination, Marianne Moore is dignified, white-haired, and demure in her tricorne hat. She lives with her mother until the latter’s death. She maintains meaningful friendships with fellow poets but never marries or falls in love.

Linda Leavell’s Holding On Upside Down—the first biography of Moore written with the support of her family’s estate—delves beneath the surface of this calcified image to reveal a passionate, canny woman caught between genuine devotion to her mother and an irrepressible desire for freedom. Her many poems about survival are revealed to be not just quirky nature studies but acts of survival themselves.

As a young poet, Moore joined the Greenwich Village artists and writers who wanted to overthrow all her mother’s pieties. She also won their admiration for the radical originality and technical proficiency of her verse. After her mother’s death thirty years later, the aging recluse transformed herself into a charismatic performer and beloved celebrity. She won virtually every literary prize available to her and was widely hailed as America’s greatest living poet.

Elegantly written, meticulously researched, critically acute, and psychologically nuanced, Holding On Upside Down provides at last the biography that this major poet and complex personality deserves.

© 2024 Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Ebook): 9780374710996

Release date

Ebook: 26 March 2024